Photo Credit: Hivemind
Venture Capital group Hivemind has announced the acquisition of the Napster music streaming platform.
Napster grew to prominence in the late ’90s and early 2000s for revolutionizing the music industry by introducing the world to music downloads. The service has gone through several iterations since its original form, landing on being a music streaming service. Now a venture capital firm has announced it has acquired Napster to revolutionize the service again.
“Hivemind and Algorand today announced the acquisition of Napster to one again revolutionize the music industry by bringing blockchain and web3 to artists and fans,” the announcement on Twitter reads. “Music industry veteran Emmy Lovell has been named interim CEO. Stay tuned for further details.”
No information about the purchase price was provided, so let’s break down what we know. Hivemind Capital Partners are an investment firm founded by ex-Citi Head of Structured Products Trading, Matt Zhang. It is focused on investing in projects in the web3 space, specifically those that use proof of stake blockchains like Algorand.
What is Algorand?
Algorand is one of a number of newer cryptocurrency projects aimed at accelerating transaction speeds and processing many transactions at a second. Think the Visa or MasterCard network, but based on a blockchain that can host other asset tokens (non-fungible tokens).
It’s also an open source blockchain, so anyone can view and contribute to the platform’s code. It uses an operating protocol called proof of stake, which recruits network operators from the pool of ALGO coin holders.
Algorand was built on using proof of stake, while Ethereum is still trying to transition to this operating protocol. Ethereum still relies on the ‘old’ proof of work protocol, which uses vast amounts of energy to mine new ether and process transactions on the blockchain. Ethereum can process new blocks of transactions every 12-14 seconds. Algorand can process transactions in about 4 seconds.